Saturday, December 02, 2006

Last night’s OPB presentation of Pink Floyd’s 1994 Pulse concert (the group’s last full concert) provided welcome relief from typical Friday evening TV fare. It was the second Pink Floyd concert I’ve seen on OPB this year.

It’s hard to pigeonhole Pink Floyd’s music because there’s nothing else quite like it. It seems to embrace several musical disciplines; a melding of a little bit of jazz, a little bit of rock, a little bit of contemporary, and a little bit of easy listening. It’s all of those things and a whole lot more. Maybe avant-garde rock describes it best. For sure, the music is innovative, distinctive and original, with David Gilmour’s sometimes-weak vocals being the only downside (and a small one, at that), which is more than offset by talented musicians who finesse their various instruments to generate a purity of musical sound unrivaled in the industry. It’s highly unlikely that any other group could be mistaken for Pink Floyd.

Unlike the pyrotechnic displays that accompanied some of the earlier concerts, the high-tech light show that accompanied the Pulse concert complimented the performance rather than distracted from it.

In a testament to the timeless quality of Pink Floyd’s music, the roughly 40-year old psychedelic rock band played some of their earlier songs—among them Money and Dark Side of the Moon—that were popular in the early ‘70’s to an audience of the ‘90’s. That the same music played so well to an audience that’s crossed the threshold of a new millennium is further proof of Pink Floyd’s ability to leave its imprint on every generation it touches.